


Paying It Forward

by Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Childhood Memories, Drifting Apart, Game: Resident Evil 7, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Nostalgia, Pre-Canon, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:33:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28723653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/pseuds/Coffin%20Liqueur
Summary: Zoe very, very belatedly opens a Christmas gift.
Relationships: Lucas Baker & Zoe Baker
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	Paying It Forward

Lucas had given her the little box when she was about...

...hell.

Fifteen, maybe. Sixteen? Seventeen? She disliked that them bein’ kids felt quite that long ago, though in her defense, she supposed that that wasn’t helped much by how little Lucas had ever _changed_ from year to year.

She remembered, at any rate - remembered gettin’ the thing.

Holidays had always been a funny thing for him. They’d put him in an... ill mood, in one part; they’d meant family. Not just the usual family, either; the dad who he hated so much, or the mom with whom he existed in a state of clingy distrust. Once upon a time, they’d meant visitors, too - extended family, and the like. Plus obligations, and heck of a lot that his paradoxically at once grumpy and chronically seriousness-hating ass he rejected as _cheesy chintz_. Whenever he couldn’t maintain a bubble between himself and any of that, as was his way, he shut down. Clammed up, and made no secret that exposure to it may as well a’ been a bad _pain_.

In the lulls and tides o’ space between _all that_ , however, he’d always managed to pick up a little sprightliness about him. A cheer, a pep-in-his-step that he’d always had whenever he was _up to something_ (she now thought with an acute chill down her back, and a sharp-eyed glance thrown back to the trailer door, her gray eyes cuttin’ cold through slathery orange light and water-choked stillness).

Whichever Christmas it had been, it’d been in one of his buzzing periods of _movement_ between the stuffiness he’d _sandwiched_ holidays with - it would’ve been well after morning gift-opening wherein he heavy-headedly dug into presents that he was inevitably unimpressed with receiving; _judgily_ watched as she went ‘n ripped into maybe one or two things she knew he’d been led around a shop to pick out sometime in the weeks before, under the approving-or-veto-ing supervision of Mama. It would’ve, however, not been that long _before_ a particularly big and lengthy suppertime he’d hate maybe a little less than usual if Uncle Joe were to show up that year. (As she recalled, he had, in fact, showed up that year.)

That second part was obvious and inherent to the memory. She’d been sittin’ on the couch and reading under the sounds of an ambiently-playing seasonal film, waitin’ for Mama to put out some scraps to snack on before suppertime - maybe splash a little wine into glasses for her and Lucas to sip at and truly feel that it was a special occasion with.

And then he’d come along and done something he’d been good at, in those better moods of his: light up her mind and the atmosphere by tossin’ a little spark of whatever was going on in his at her.

She’d bounced a little in place at a stiff plonk, on the coffee table; blinked and leaned in over her book. He’d already abandoned the thing he’d put down, crossing around the couch to its arn. She’d heard him shifting his weight to stand put as he tartly snipped out a “Heeeere ya go”.

The thing he’d put down had been a wooden box - grooved at angles both right and sharp. Marked up to hell and back in jagged black ink patterns. She hadn’t been entirely sure what it was at the time, let alone able to process immediately that it had been for her. She’d swung a look back over her shoulder at him, her eyebrow arching and her mouth slanting. After a beat, he’d blinked and blinked and looked around with his head drawin’ back, a grimace peeling open slightly at its corner, shruggin’ his shoulders and fanning his hands outward in the air, all like _“what?”_

Fair enough; he’d never been a fan of explainin’ shit, and like a lot else about him, exactly why hadn’t ever seemed entirely sensible. Sometimes, his huffiness over answering questions would smack of impatience at explaining something that shoulda been obvious; other times, it spoiled the fun.

And she had figured out what it was, within about ten seconds of picking the thing up.

It’d been a puzzle box, and up until this night, she still hadn’t solved it.

It sat in her lap now - lookin’ arguably more home than she felt, in the condition the estate was in these days. Its simple rough wood was pitted and softened in spots and splintered at edges; it was dotted with black mildew, granted not nearly as much as she’d expected to find it with, diggin’ under her old bed for somewhere to stash medicine that might make some poor soul who found their way into the property just a little less unlucky.

The black ink marks had come together along four of its sides into increasingly coherent imagery - now, they formed a line of deer skeletons, marchin’ in a looping line, heads held high and raising crowns of spiky antlers. Was strange that the ink didn’t look remotely faded, or like it had bled, instead imposing its image in vantablack shadows.

There was one more image she had to complete - a disembodied skull at the top. This one had been the hardest, even tonight, on account a’ her having looked a while for fragments of antlers that it appeared that this deer was without. She’d laughed silently, with one corner of her mouth nearly spasming and her chest feelin’ at once compressed and hollow, as she’d remembered a to-do Lucas had made to a much younger her one particular Christmas, goin’ on about how he’d learned in school that only _girl_ reindeer had antlers in the winter, so all of Santa’s reindeer had to be girls, but according to the song and the movie, Rudolph was a _he_ , so he _shouldn’t_ have antlers.

...Even the bitter… overtone, to be blunt, of the memory and laughter had breathed off to a resolute dullness as she registered that she’d given herself the last hint that she needed to solve the puzzle.

The tip of her index finger glided over the back of the box and hit somethin’ small and raised. She thinned her lips and turned a piece into place.

A li’l red stone locked onto the top of the box, at the tip of the hornless grinning skull’s hollow nose, and she heard a _click_ , nice and clear.

Her head dropped - nodding at recognizing something like it was a common cue. She grabbed the box tighter with each hand - pulled it open like a clamshell, narrowing her eyes and turning her head away a hint as she did so, half-expecting a noise or somethin’ leaping on out at her, or, hell, a blast in her face; wasn’t as if she could ever be sure Lucas hadn’t gotten to the thing to make some modifications to her old Christmas present before she dug it back up.

She was met with no such thing, however, and pff, for god’s sake, that space in things was one that felt too dark and quiet for a sec; left her brow furrowing and her mouth lining in a moment of concern.

She scanned it - all around and along the upper lid, first, before she realized that it, too, had been marked up. This ink was faded, blotchy; what looked like more patches of mold at first parsed out to **“MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!”** written in fat felt-tip marker. She squinted and leaned in at hair-thin additional markings underneath comin’ out to **“HO-HO-HO”**.

Her eyes switched down to the box’s interior.

Her lip wobbled and she flinched a second, showin’ her teeth and flaring her nostrils to make an exhale of suddenly-detected or -imagined decay-scent all the more effective.

There was definitely a dead mouse inside.

Desiccated. White, scratchy-lookin’ pits where eyes or buttons or the like mighta been at some point. Dust-gray fur lay flat at spots; it cowlicked up sharply at others. It wore a Santa hat made of felt, mayhaps taken from some toy or decoration, similarly faded and damaged. A little bent noisemaker was tied with a twist-tie to its snout, made of a roll-up of what she reckoned was a scrap of wrapping paper, from the red and yellow and faint slippery shine.

She bit her lip and her eyes narrowed in suspicious contemplation o’ the last bit of the mouse-Santa’s outfit: a lumpy pouch, also made o’ felt in a puke-and-porridgey gray, “balanced” on the back of the thing, nearly as big as its carrier was.

Zoe reached forward, hand crab-claw-like; she gave the pouch a squeeze, rubbin’ lightly into it with fingers that found hard edges at irregular points. Her chest clenched somewhat; she took a long breath in as she picked the pack up and undid the little leather lace securing it to Santa Mouse, keepin’ herself focused and steady. She hadn’t gotten past the point of the little asshole bein’ able to sneak her a bomb or the like yet.

She loosened the lace.

Pinched the pouch by it and a bottom corner, and tipped it slowly like some cartoon chemist guiding a fateful droplet from one beaker to another.

Something fell and she felt it fall - the teeniest tip in weight and whisper of friction - and she twisted away from the counter, bitin’ the side of her freed left fist.

A noise hit ‘n she jumped at it like it _was_ an explosion, a flash of gold and white bursting behind shut eyes.

And the light simply shimmered out, dancing itself dampened as the noise repeated.

Another little tide of memories scattered, too, in her head; she furrowed her brow out as she glanced between them in her mind’s eye, sorting out. She thought of two little kids collecting pebbles on the water’s edge; she thought of emptying pockets of hard candies from quarter machines at the grocery store onto the kitchen table, and seeing who, if anyone, had a flavor that the other one didn’t for some arbitrary trade - and was aware in retrospect that Lucas had probably in fact conned her multiple times during said trades, in his eyes.

Coins clinking as they were scrounged from a tin by a little raccoonishly-grabbing hand by a big brother who wanted the metal, or one particular trinket he couldn’t explain the usefulness of to Mama and Daddy without dying of impatience.

It was just as she thought of that particular sound that she looked right back over to the counter. Little plates of brown metal sat scattered wherever they lay beside the box, the dingy little pouch sitting among them.

* * *

Later that night Zoe returned to the old room, and on elbows and knees, she slipped a single bronze coin marked with a pelican into the place where the box had been - a gift for a gift, some extra luck to go with the medicine.

She supposed she didn’t mind paying with her memories for what the family had become.

Later, still, before morning, Lucas flipped a coin with a flick of his thumb onto a table in the loft before dumping a bottle of white pills into a dish, smiling cynically as he crushed ‘em with a pestle at the way everything came around, and around, and around.


End file.
